Dailey Blend Show - Weekly Rundown: Week of February 21st, 2025 (The Rise of Soccer in America)
In this episode of the Dailey Blend show, Reed Dailey discusses the growth of soccer in America, particularly the MLS and USL, and shares insights on his various projects, including the Daily Blend podcast and the development of Sheridan clothing. He emphasizes the importance of community in sports and the exciting developments in soccer leagues, as well as updates on merchandise and collaborations.
Takeaways
Soccer's popularity is on the rise in the U.S.
The MLS has improved its product significantly over the years.
Community building is essential for soccer teams.
The USL is working to elevate its status to compete with the MLS.
Merchandise for Daily Blend is in development.
The Daily Blend podcast continues to thrive with new episodes.
Reid is excited about the new Oklahoma soccer team.
Sheridan clothing is focused on golf-centric apparel.
Reid is passionate about soccer merchandise and swag.
The podcast aims to launch episodes weekly on Mondays.
Chapters
Welcome to the Dailey Blend Show: 01:06
Excitement for MLS Season 30: 06:46
Updates on Daily Blend Projects: 10:21
Sheridan Golf Clothing Brand Launch: 12:00
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Transcription - Dailey Blend Show
Host Reed Dailey (IG & X - @ReedDailey): This is the weekly rundown segment of the Dailey Blend Show
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Daily Blend show with me, Reid Daily. If you're new around here, this is the week we r-
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Daily Blend show with me, Reid Daly. If you're new around here, this is the weekly rundown where we cover things going on across Daily Blend, special projects I'm involved with, collaborations, and much more. Before we jump in the show, I want to remind you that we are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. We're on social on Instagram, X and threads at dailyblend.
And of course, go and check us out at DailyBlend.com. With all that said, let's jump into this week's weekly rundown. We are getting very close to the MLS Season 30, which I am extremely excited about. So for some context here, I grew up playing soccer in the Tri-State area and then finished up high school down in Atlanta, Georgia.
had the opportunity to play at a Division I school in New York, St. John's, played against my brother who played at Rutgers, he played pro, and soccer was a huge part of my life. And, you know, I had the opportunity, I think it was my freshman year, we were in very cold Columbus Crew Stadium, and we were there for the Final Four with the MLS commissioner, and he was talking about
how the league had been around at the time, I think for less than 10 years. And he said, look, this is the first soccer specific stadium. If you fast forward 20, 30 years from now, you're going to see every team or most teams with soccer specific stadiums, a team in every major city. And soccer will be in the top three to four sports watched, consumed, participated in by Americans.
If I do the math, he's got almost all of those correct except for teams like mine in Chicago where we're still playing out of the Bears stadium, but we'll come back to that. Anyway, the product is much better than it was. We have moved from what I'll call being athletic to actually playing soccer and putting out a great product and being a great feeder program over to Europe and really building communities around these teams.
you know, give shout outs both in terms of the men's and the women's, but let's start with the men's. The team down in Atlanta, Larry Luke, who I had the pleasure of getting to know when I lived down Atlanta, has been a fantastic creative director for the Atlanta United. What's going on down in Austin, Texas with their facility is second to none. What I'm seeing out of NYCFC is fantastic. Not only are they
using my favorite powder blue, daily blue color palette, but they're building a new stadium in Queens where I went to school right down the street. So it's just gonna be a lot of fun. And what I love about what soccer is all about is the beginning of every new season you have sort of new kits. And what looks to be happening with the MLS is they'll do home one year, away the other, sometimes they'll do a third kit mid-season. And so, you know,
as part of the sort of MLS 30, you all the teams have new kits. So if you go to MLS.com or MLSsoccer.com, you can see those new kits. I have not purchased one for the Chicago Fire, but they have the new municipal jersey this year. That's just the branded term they're giving for it. And I love the municipal logo. It's the three rivers coming together in Chicago. I'm probably gonna pick that up, probably gonna pick up some ATL swag. And I think I'm...
going to be a sucker for not just one but two NYCFC hats. I like the logo that was designed and then I like this real minimalist logo that they're rocking on a couple hat. I'm a sucker for swag. Anyway, highly recommend going and getting a jersey or a scarf and one of the like life hacks if you will or hacks is if you don't want to spend like the full freight on a jersey just go on
know, MLS or adidas.com or Nike and look for last year's kits and you can get them for basically half off. The way that they typically run them is do like the real jersey, the replica and sort of like this, you know, almost t-shirt dry fit sort of thing. So you can find something for everyone. What's also interesting about what's going on with soccer is the fact that the other league is the USL.
And for a long time, it's been kind of sort of considered a B-League to the MLS. However, a large ownership group has tried to, or has come out and said that they're going to elevate the product and bring it up into a similar stance to the MLS. And why I'm really excited about this is my folks are from, or my mom's from Oklahoma City, my parents live there now, and one of our family friends,
purchased the Oklahoma Energy and is in the process of renaming it, rebranding it, and building a new stadium. And it's not hard to see how folks like him got attracted to coming into the USL. And if you think about like fast forwarding, you could have two leagues that could compete with each other. You could have mergers, divestitures, and one of the big things between, sorry, the MLS and the USL. But what the USL is really talking about
is fantastic is relegation. So something that Europe does that makes basically every game matter and playoffs non-existent is you're basically playing to survive, not just win. So you can go and play, but if you're like the last two teams in the Premier League, you drop down the two teams and the league below that come up and it's really cool. So the fact that the USL is doing that is really exciting.
In terms of the Oklahoma Energy, my guess is they get renamed something like Oklahoma Athletic Club or Oklahoma Football Club. But looking forward to it, the same gentleman who I should know his name, I'll have it for next week, that designed the logos for NYCFC, Chicago Fire, Jordan Brand has been hired to do the Oklahoma logo. So I know it's going to look good.
And as soon as jerseys come out, I will be purchasing one and I can't wait to attend a game. I saw where the stadiums could be put. It's right downtown. It's across the highway from where the basketball arena is. And as someone who's been going to Oklahoma his whole life, I love that city. And it just gives me something else to do while I'm there. So I've got the energy or sorry, the Oklahoma team, basketball and minor league baseball. So I got all my sports covered down there, not to mention.
you know, OU football. So anyway, so check out the USL, go find your team. I have mine. Go check out the MLS and make sure you get a jersey. And one of the great things is the fact that Apple and the MLS did a partnership. So if you are, you know, have a Apple TV or iPhone, you can actually watch, I think every game of the MLS. And I did it last year.
and the second half of the season, the season before, because Messi joined, and it was a whole lot of fun and I caught a ton of games. It's really, blows my mind how the MLS product, in terms of like all the production around it, has elevated. So, off to them.
All right. Switching from talking about MLS, let's talk about what's going on across Daily Blend and special projects. So the Daily Blend podcast, which is the 15 year running podcast or radio show, however you want to think about it for all my sort of house music is been alive and kicking. The one thing I noticed is when I have a little bit of free time and have the ability to
go and listen to music and download a bunch of tracks. I end up doing like a lot of batching in terms of going and finding tracks and then doing a bunch of mixes, having them teed up. we've got episode 156, 57 and 58 are up and live. We launched the Daily Blend podcast YouTube channel. So you can check them out on SoundCloud, Apple podcast and on YouTube.
Unfortunately, Spotify hasn't figured out how to do monetization of podcasts, so you cannot check them out on Spotify, but they're available everywhere else. The other thing that we're doing is we're working on some merch. We came up with sort of this new logo design that I'm really proud of. So you can see it over on YouTube and you'll start to see it on the Daily Blend Podcast Instagram account. And so we're going to be working on a couple different things for sort of like a capsule collection.
I'm not sure if it's going to be hats, hoodies, sweatshirts, all of the above, but be on the lookout. We'll probably have that ready for next week to talk about and share. Going from that to some Daily Blend show interviews. So excited because I'm recording this early and right after this, I'm actually jumping into a sound off interview with a very creative
guy out of Canada that I've been looking forward to having this conversation for a number of months, did the prep probably two or three months ago and just been following him on Instagram and did sort of a cold outreach to him and just a really nice guy. So looking forward to that. I want to highlight a couple of shows that we've done more recently, one with Sean Wood of Human Pilots AI. So Sean is co-founder with me over at Lewis Manning.
and he runs an AI consulting firm helping organizations figure out how to leverage AI to operate more efficiently and effectively. The next one is with Dan over at High and Mighty and they have the ready to drink shakeups and other hand beverages. And then of course, a hometown gal here in Chicago, Rachel J, my favorite stylist out of Chicago.
What I'll do is I'll make sure that all of those shows are linked in the show notes and make sure you go check out those episodes. Rounding out the show, want to talk about what's going on with Sheridan. If you have not paid attention to the show, Sheridan is the golf clothing and apparel brand or golfs, you know, centric clothing brand that we're going to be putting out. We've got samples coming in. We've done two rounds of hats. So happy with.
how those are coming out, both domestically and then abroad and kind of our partners that we've identified to help us manufacture those. We did a first round of polos. The cut was pretty good. The styling was, I would say, great. The material, not so good. So we're going to do a different round with a different supplier and see what that looks like. We did 3 fourths zips and those came out great. So really happy about that.
One or two more sample rounds and then we're going to start putting out the hats and pullos and we're also looking into some gloves and a couple other accessories. So make sure to go check us out on Instagram that is Sheridan.Golf. I'll make sure I link that. We might change it from Sheridan.Golf to Sheridan.Clothing or Clothers.
Sort of looking at what others have done in the space and it just feels more Logical to me, but who cares? I'll make sure I like it in the notes Outside of that, you know, we're kicking back up. I've mentioned this drink with Greg so after this workday I'm going to be working on a couple of the sort of drinks of the week So on the next week's episode, you'll hear more about what we're bringing to
get with a drink with Greg. And with that said, I hope you enjoy this week. We're going to try launching the weekly rundown on Mondays moving forward. So you'll get this episode on Mondays in your inbox. And with that said, enjoy your week. We'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in.
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